Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter (12 page)

“Well, they're long gone by now,” Luke said.

“And good riddance.”

Luke poured another drink. “I'll drink to that.”

Luke came awake and stretched. He was aware of the warm figure stirring beside him in the bed. Doris's voice murmured sleepily, “Is it morning already, honey?”

“Indeed it is.” Luke sat up and looked around Doris's room, which was located on the second floor of the Golden Buzzard. He hadn't paid much attention to the details the night before. The room was furnished simply with the bed, a dressing table, a ladder-back chair, and an old wardrobe that had been a nice piece of furniture at one time. Like everything else, it was showing its age.

Aren't we all, Luke thought as he swung his legs out of bed and stood up to stretch again, wearing only the bottom half of his long underwear.

Sunlight slanted through the gauzy yellow curtain over the room's lone window. He didn't normally sleep that late, but he'd had quite a bit to drink the night before, not to mention a good meal. And once they'd adjourned to her room, Doris had proven to be an energetic companion.

Luke wasn't stupid enough to believe that he could always tell when a woman was sincere, but he thought her enthusiasm had been genuine. As she had put it, “You're not the handsomest gent I've ever seen, but you really are a gentleman. I don't run into one of those in a month of Sundays!”

He had just pulled his trousers on and buttoned them when a tentative knock sounded on the door. He had a pretty good idea who was there, but drew one of his Remingtons from its holster, anyway as he went over to answer the knock. His thumb was looped over the hammer as he called, “Who is it?”

“Just me, Luke,” Hobie replied. “I got the horses ready to go, like you told me last night.”

Luke had to think for a second before he recalled telling Hobie to see to it that the horses were saddled and fed by sunup. He wanted to get an early start. Gunner Kelly and Dog Eater had quite a lead on them, and if he and Hobie were going to cut into that lead, they couldn't afford to waste any time.

Luke glanced out the window again and muttered a curse. Judging by the light, at least an hour had gone by since sunrise. There was no excuse for that, he told himself firmly. Hobie might wind up being a better bounty hunter than he was, sooner rather than later.

“Go order us some coffee and breakfast at the hash house,” Luke said through the door. “I'll be right there.”

“I already did,” Hobie said. “The food will be ready in a few minutes.”

Luke grunted. The boy was smart. Maybe a little too smart for his own good.

Luke pulled on the rest of his clothes, stomped into his boots, and buckled on the double gun rig. When he bent over the bed, he saw that Doris had gone back to sleep. Smiling faintly, he bent lower and brushed a kiss across her blond hair. She moved her head a little and smiled, but didn't open her eyes.

Luke left a double eagle on the dressing table. With the violent life he led, a moment of gentleness was well worth it. And he wanted Doris to have good memories of him, too.

Hobie was waiting in front of the saloon. They left the horses tied at the hitch rack, their saddlebags full of supplies, and went across the street to eat.

They didn't linger over breakfast and soon were mounted and riding out of the settlement. As they put the town behind them, Luke realized he hadn't even gone to the trouble of finding out the name. It didn't matter. It was just one more stop on the trail that led them after their quarry.

Hobie wasn't any less talkative, at least starting out, but Luke kept them moving at a fast pace that eventually grew tiring for man and horse alike. Hobie quieted down and reserved his strength for riding.

By the time two more days had passed, Hobie was taciturn most of the time and beginning to get a drawn, gaunt look about him. His eyes had dark circles under them, and patchy stubble covered his cheeks and jaw. It was probably the longest he had ever been out on the trail, away from civilization.

“This is the way you spend your days?” he asked once as they stopped to rest the horses.

“Most of them,” Luke said.

“Don't you get lonely, 'way off out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Luke shrugged. “You get used to it. If you can't, you don't stay in this life for very long. But even when you're in a town, you're still alone for the most part. Most people don't have a very high opinion of bounty hunters. To them, we're just one step above the outlaws we hunt, and a pretty small step, at that. If that bothers you—”

“I know. You don't last long at the job.”

“That's right.”

A short time later, after they were riding again, Luke noticed a cloud of dust rising ahead of them. For a second, his pulse quickened with the thought that the dust might be coming from horses ridden by Kelly and Dog Eater, but then he realized that was pretty unlikely.

For one thing, the two fugitives would have had to stop for several days in order for Luke and Hobie to catch up to them so soon, and Luke didn't think they would do that.

For another, there was too much dust. Even with the extra horses they had taken from the ranch, Kelly and Dog Eater shouldn't have been kicking up a cloud like that.

Hobie saw it, too. “What's that?”

“I don't know. A big group of riders, maybe a wagon team. Look at the way the dust is moving. They're angling across our path from the north-east.” Luke gestured to indicate what he was talking about. “It's probably not Kelly and Dog Eater, if that's what you're thinking.”

“I guess it's not really any of our business, then.”

“You're right about that,” Luke said.

Despite what he'd told Hobie, curiosity gnawed at him. The dust cloud was moving pretty fast, and if somebody was in a hurry, it usually meant trouble.

So did gunshots, and that's what Luke heard a moment later, floating through the hot air.

He reined in and motioned for Hobie to do likewise. The young man frowned as the shots continued. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Gunfire,” Luke said. “Quite a bit of it, too. Somebody's fighting a battle up there, a mile or so ahead of us.”

“Shouldn't we go see about it?” Hobie said eagerly. “Maybe Kelly and Dog Eater are mixed up in it.”

“That's possible,” Luke admitted. “Unlikely, but we can't rule it out.” He lifted his reins. “Come on.”

Their mounts were far from fresh, but Luke thought the horses had one good run left in them. Hobie matched his pace as they hurried toward the dust cloud, which didn't seem to be moving anymore. It was thinning as the breeze blew through it.

That fact, along with the continuing gunshots, told Luke it wasn't a running fight anymore. Pursuers and the pursued had come to a stop and were battling it out.

It was flat country for the most part, broken by ravines, shallow bluffs, and mesas. They came in sight of one of those tabletop formations, and Luke stopped to get his spyglass out of his saddlebags. Hobie followed suit, digging out his field glasses.

“Where did you get those glasses, anyway?” Luke asked as he tried to focus through the telescope.

“An old man back in Rio Rojo gave them to me as payment for some odd jobs I did for him. He fought in the War Between the States and said he used them then.” Hobie paused. “Were you in the war, Luke?”

“I was. I suppose that makes me an old man, too.”

“No, sir, I didn't say that. Which side were you on?”

Luke didn't like to talk about the war. Too many bad memories, culminating in the betrayal that had almost taken his life and set him on a lonely trail for a decade and a half afterward.

“I fought for the Confederacy,” he said with a curt note in his voice, letting Hobie know he didn't want to discuss the subject at length.

“Oh. The fella who gave me these glasses, he was a Union officer.”

“Plenty of good men on both sides. It was a shame so many of them had to die because of a bunch of damned politicians.” Luke stiffened as the image came into focus through the spyglass. “Well, that doesn't look good.”

“I don't—Oh, Lord. Is that a stagecoach?”

“It is,” Luke said.

The coach was lying on its side near the base of the mesa. It appeared the team had broken loose when the wreck occurred, since the horses were no longer hitched to the coach and he didn't see them nearby. Puffs of powder smoke came from behind the coach as its defenders used it for cover.

Luke swung the spyglass, searching for the other side of the conflict. He found them a moment later, a dozen or more riders who had dismounted and stretched out on their bellies to snipe at the coach with rifle fire from a distance of about two hundred yards.

Hobie saw the men through his field glasses, too. “Do you reckon those hombres are outlaws?”

“More than likely. I can't think of any other reason they would waylay that coach.” Luke moved the spyglass back to the overturned vehicle and frowned as he noticed something odd. Dust kept flying from the mesa as bullets struck the side of it behind the coach.

For some reason, the riflemen were aiming high. They were trying to keep the people behind the coach pinned down there, instead of picking them off.

Someone who had been riding in that coach was important to the attackers, Luke realized. They wanted to keep whoever it was alive. That put a slightly different slant on things.

And it made Luke more curious than ever.

“I don't think this is a simple holdup after all,” he told Hobie. He explained what he had noticed and the conclusions he'd drawn from it. “They'll keep the driver, the guard, and the passengers pinned down until nightfall, and then they'll sneak in under cover of darkness and grab whoever they're after.”

“We can't let 'em do that, can we?” Hobie asked.

“Again, it's not really any of our business.”

“No, but they have to be planning something pretty bad, or they wouldn't have stopped the stagecoach and started all that shooting.”

“It's possible the people with the coach don't have any rifles, either,” Luke mused. “Just handguns and the guard's shotgun—which means they're wasting bullets. The riders are out of range.”

“Not for us,” Hobie said. “Not if we get closer.”

Luke frowned at the young man. “You don't seem to grasp the concept of our job, Hobie. We go after wanted fugitives and bring them in, dead or alive, so we can collect the rewards for them. We don't ride around the countryside doing good deeds, like knights from some storybook.”

“But those people are in trouble. Some of 'em are likely to get killed before this is over, if they haven't already.”

Luke tried not to sigh. His own impulse was to pitch in and give those folks with the stagecoach a hand. If Hobie hadn't been there, he might have been able to resist that temptation. With the young man around to goad him into doing the right thing, there was no chance of turning and riding away.

“All right,” Luke said as he put the spyglass away. He pointed to the north. “See that little knob over there? We'll circle around behind it. That'll give us some cover and also the high ground. From up there we ought to have a pretty good shot at those riflemen.”

Hobie nodded eagerly and turned his horse toward the knob.

With the attackers concentrating their attention on the wrecked stagecoach, Luke figured it was unlikely they would be looking behind them. He and Hobie moved fast, galloping behind the rocky elevation and then reining to a halt when it was between them and the riflemen. Each tied his horse to a stunted mesquite and pulled his Winchester from the saddle boot.

The knob was about twenty feet high, its sides sloping gently enough that they were able to scramble to the top without any trouble. At the crest, Luke took his hat off and stretched out on his belly to peer at the landscape in front of them. Hobie did likewise, stretching out beside him.

The stagecoach's attackers were about fifty yards away, in easy range for a rifle.

Hobie swallowed hard and asked, “Do we shoot to kill?”

“Most of the time when you use a gun, you don't want to leave any doubt about the outcome.”

“But we don't really know who those men are or what's going on here,” Hobie argued. “Maybe they're a posse of lawmen. Outlaws could have stolen that stagecoach, and they're just trying to get it back.”

That seemed like a pretty far-fetched idea to Luke, but he supposed they couldn't rule it out. Hobie was right that they didn't know the whole story.

Luke sighed. “Kid, you're going to be the death of me yet. But I guess you've earned that right since you saved my life.” He nestled his cheek against the smooth wood of the Winchester's stock as he squinted over the barrel. “All right, let's see if we can spook them enough to make them run.”